If only I'd known then what I know now…

It’s been a while since I’ve devoted any time to “Photographs and Memories”, but I think it’s a post that’s long overdue. They say “every picture tells a story”, and I do believe that’s true. I know most of our old family photos do, anyway. It’s fun to look back at old photos and remember how things used to be. I hope my readers won’t mind accompanying me on a little walk down memory lane today.

Ed in 1978

This picture was taken of Ed not long after our first child, Brandy, was born. I still called him “Edward”, back then, and just look at all of that brown hair on his head! This picture was probably taken in the late fall. If you look closely, in the background, you can see the remainders of harvested cornstalks, still out in the field.

If you look even closer, you’ll see our (white) house in the far left background of the photo. Actually, at this point in time, our “house” was actually a mobile home with 1/2 of a house built all the way down one side of it! As Ed’s mom used to say, “Back then, we were poor and didn’t even know it!” We may have been “poor”, but we were happy, and were proud of our “house that Ed built.”

Eventually, we completely enclosed our mobile home, so that it looked just like a house. It was a process that would take us about thirteen years to complete. The mobile home section of the house is now gone, totally replaced with new construction in 1991. The “house that Ed built” still stands, today, next-door to where we currently live. Our daughter and her family are living there now.

The most interesting thing, to me, about this picture, is the fact that it was taken in what now serves as our oldest son’s back yard! Little did we know, thirty-six years ago, that our son, who had yet to be born, would be living on this very spot of the family farm!

My daddy (left) and Ed’s daddy (right) cir. the mid 70’s

Several things come to my attention when I look at this picture. First of all, both of our daddies still had dark hair! By the time our daughter was born, in 1978, Ed’s daddy’s hair had turned totally gray. He previously used ‘Grecian Formula’, for men, so I had no idea his hair was actually gray!

I see that daddy is wearing shorts, and Ed’s daddy is not wearing any shoes! This was usually the case during the summertime. Ed’s daddy rarely wore any shoes around the house, and, often, rolled the legs of his pants up. Ed’s daddy is also wearing, his trademark white t-shirt!

The next thing I notice is the grill in the picture. That was the best grill daddy ever owned! He could cook a ton of things on it, at one time, and he used it for years and years. Bar-b-Que chicken was his specialty, and was the meal we had for supper on the night of my first date with Ed! The grill was green, and was made out of heavy-duty metal, much different from what’s being manufactured, today. I still remember having to share the backseat of our little Firebird, with that new grill, on a trip home from Jacksonville, Florida.

Last, but not least, is daddy’s car, in the background. I think this Oldsmobile was one of daddy’s all-time favorite cars. It was the last new car that he purchased. Little did we know that daddy’s beloved Oldsmobile would become the victim of fire, when the storage building/shelter caught on fire, one evening. We never knew, for sure, what started the fire, but it claimed the car before daddy could get it moved to safety. Fortunately, my parents’ house was spared from the fire though.

the pool and deck that Ed built

I’m going to flash forward, a bit, and share a picture of the pool and deck that Ed built. The year was 1995, and that’s my brother and his family posing on our newly completed deck. The baby in the picture is now twenty years old!

We bought the above-ground pool at a JC Penney ‘end of the summer’ sale in 1994, for about two thousand dollars. We stored the pool until the spring of 1995, then Ed and a couple of friends set it up in March. It was a huge oval shaped pool, 16 x 32, I think. We bought a special, stretchable, (Doughboy) liner, and dug out one end of the pool, so it would be suitable for diving.

Ed built a huge deck along one entire side of the pool, then he built a walkway all the way around it. We put indoor/outdoor carpeting on the large area of the deck. Ed even built a walkway from the pool deck, and joined it to the house. We didn’t even have to get our feet dirty on the way to our pool!

We enjoyed the pool and deck for ten years. Eventually, the children all grew up, and we no longer used the pool. Ed took the pool down, and I gave it away to a co-worker. Ed took the deck apart, and got rid of most of it. We’ve used many of the posts and decking boards for other projects, over the past few years.

Little did Ed and I know, when this picture was taken, that, one day, we’d build another house on the back side of this deck and be living in it during our retirement! Do you see that Magnolia tree, in the far right of the picture? Little did we know, when we planted it as a shrub, it would furnish shade for us, in our golden years. That tree sits in what is now our front yard, and we sit underneath it, almost daily. Back then, little did we know, indeed!